My name is Ryan David Ginsberg. I am married to a wonderful human being named Teresa. I have three dogs--Shadow, Midas, and Brother. I have a bonsai tree named Boogey (it is a bougainvillea). I own, like, a LOT of books...and have read some of them. I was skinny for nearly three months back in 2015--good times, good times.
I was born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. I was once religious myself, but I no longer am. I have three tattoos, all of which remind me—in different languages: English, Hebrew, and Tswana—to not kill myself. But when the thoughts and desires kept coming, even after the ink had settled into my skin, my therapist suggested I pair the tattoos with 20 MG a day of Paxil, or rather, a knock-off version, for that is all my insurance would cover. Name-brand pills are not a luxury I can afford.
The combination of tattoos and pills seems to be working just fine, for I have yet to kill myself.
I have been writing since I was sixteen years old. I discovered my love for writing poetry in a brown leather journal given to me by my Youth Pastor. It was in that leather journal, writing poetry, that I discovered how much of the world around me was not as I thought it to be. Like the leather journal I thought was a real leather journal, but turned out to be a fraud. Like the god I thought would save me, like the happiness I thought would never fade, like my many dreams which did not come true, despite me setting my mind to it like my father taught me to do as a kid.
I filled the journal to the brim, then started my first blog. Since then, I have started and stopped countless blogs, upon which I have likely published thousands of poems, blog posts, short stories, and immature rants showing off my misunderstandings of this and that. In college, I had a YouTube channel called 'TheGinsberger' where I posted vlogs, comedy skits, and one (very horribly made) short film called To My Future Self. Future Self here: don't make a short film again.
After graduating from college, I moved to Los Angeles and wrote a screenplay while living out of my car. The script, called 'Preparing to Die', was never made into a movie; instead, like its main character, it died. Though I later revived its memory, using its ashes to construct a short story for my book The Crumbling of a Nation and Other Stories.
After the failed attempt of writing a screenplay, and then another which never made it past the thirtieth page, I turned my sights to more literary ambitions. I started, as one does, writing things that I knew. So, I wrote a memoir called Becoming Me. It was written much like the style of the memoir out today called Dream House. I sent it out to over 200 literary agents. All of whom replied, "Who the hell wants to read a book about you?" Which was fair. So I wrote a second book. It was called The Poetic Mind of Ebenezer Lieberman. Agents said, "You know what, maybe it's not just books about you, but also any book written by you." So I shelved it and wrote a third book. That book was called Observations From Planet Earth. This time agents called the police and reported me as a stalker. That book was later used as the premise of my short story Tommy Longhorn which I published in The Crumbling of a Nation and Other Stories.
As for The Crumbling of a Nation and Other Stories, I self-published it...considering nobody else wanted to publish it. I am thinking about doing the same with my fourth book In the Algorithm We Trust.